Posts by Dave 15

TV writer quells rumours of Doctor Who movie

Get Arnie out of California for that role, right up his street...

Brilliant script - missing a couple of minor explosions as well... sure we can add them in somewhere for effect.

Navy pays 2x purchase price to keep warship docked for 5 years

Naval stupidity

As normal why sell a ship when you can wastefully blow her to pieces.

Given the state of the modern 'navy' she would double the navy's useful strength - I can imagine Victory and Implacable sailing off into the sunset to defend Britain - at least they might stand a chance no heat signature and little metal for the enemy missiles to lock on to :)

What - I thought Victory was American

After all if you watch Hollywood and listen to our politicians and historians the Americans are the ones that have won every single battle the world has ever seen... so Trafalgar was a win, it must have been by the Americans in American ships manned by good 'ol American boys

But....

Maynot be the French and Spanish. I can well imagine Argentina noticing we have no way to defend the oil rich falklands and wanting it back. There are also other threats around - even these pirates off Africa - think how much better we could do if we had sent Ark Royal with a few planes - would be able to respond fast and sink pirate vessels quickly - it would have stopped the problem. Finally, we found out in WW2 and the Falklands that ANY ship is vulnerable to air attack, the only defence against this is aircraft of your own on site, This means having aircraft carrierS, that is plural - one can be damaged relatively easily, if you have only one then your entire mobile airforce is out of action. A huge carrier can be sunk by a single torpedo, its flight deck put out of action by a single lucky missile. At least at the moment we have (sorry had) 3 of them and a helicopter ship which could easily gain a skiramp.

I'm aftraid the idiots in charge at the treasury have no interest in protecting this country but every interest in sucking up to their banker mates and securing a decent job for themselves. This is then portrayed to gullible and stupid ministers (er.... diffference between a torpedo and tornado... no I don't know you will have to ask someone else) and even more out of touch idiot prime ministers (and all the major parties seem to delight in fielding the most gullible idiots they can to be ministers - most 6 year olds can do better).

So in a nutshell, we might as well sail Victory to the next conflict as it doesn't matter what ship you take to it the ship will be sunk, the convoys of food we need, amunition we import etc. will all be sunk and we will have no choice but to surrender in approximately 12 hours.

YouTube morphs into TV-wannabe with a splat of social goo

Register and Log on....

I wanted to watch a video posted on youtube - a site that used to allow you to put on any video for others amusment - and was told I had to register and log on.

Why exactly?

Pointless exercise, google now have a hotmail email address thats not monitored and was free, a bogus name, false address etc. the hotmail account is also similarly full of garbage.

I have taken to a new approach to all these websites that demand my details - a made up name (anotherfakename does really well - they don't even seem to notice), the address and phone number of the company owning the website. Next I will start using the CEO's or HR's email account for the coimpany whose website it is.

If we all do this sort of thing they'll eventually realise they are collecting crap and stop doing it.

Ranting Iranian TV fined £100k for shoddy interview

A WHOLE 100k wow, that must have cost them....

The whole choccy biscuit ration this week.

100k is just not a useful fine for most companies. If they can afford to transmit TV this is such a puny amount they won't even notice it, won't even cut the CEO's bonus this year.

More than $60bn spunked on cyber-security in 2011

Can quite see it....

Dear Argie/Iranian president/other undesirable,

Please stop (invading our Falkland islands/dropping nuclear bombs/shooting our people) or we will launch a 'social network' attack on you and beat you to death with lots of verbal insults....

mmm, I really see it working just as well as a damned great Vulcan dropping a few tons of munitions.... honestly, it will work - ask Dr Fox he knew all about defence (until he lost his job for feathering his nest).

Supply snitches: 4in iPhone 5 screens shipping now

will this stop the batteries bursting into flames?

Less effort needed to power the screen so the battery will be happier and not combust?

Groupon shares plunge: Drain in sight

Investors == headless chickens

They run around putting large piles of money (usually our pension money) in harebrained schemes without understanding the business case, the product, the company, the value it has.

A bunch of second hand computers in an over priced 'data centre' which provides a bunch of 'users' a 'free' service (in return for sticking adverts all over the place) is NOT as valuable or useful as a company producing food, machinery, necessary features of life... yet investors pile money in as if they were.

These investors are of course just too busy working out where to splash their over sized bonuses - which blonde bimbo they will lunch with, what ferrari they will buy. etc etc to actually attend to their proper job. Somehow they keep their bonuses yet my pension fund, although 25 years old, is not worth the money put into it - in fact I would have been so much better off burning the money for heating that I continually warn others against buying into the whole pension fund fantasy.

Wonder tonic keeps mobiles pumping web for longer

Should try

They should try porting MME (as used on the old Sony Z5/J5), it is somewhat smaller, less power hungry, quicker and capable of dealing with both real and mobile web and email.

Think that will provide a massive power saving over the modern rather clunky, large, bloated and slow browsers shipped on modern devices.

Cruel new punishment for hackers: Twitter, Facebook bans

why not give them a holiday?

Seems we are getting so soft on criminals.

Fraud is fraud where ever its done

Hacking and virus spreading over the net costs us all a fortune in cash and time.

Both should cause the perpetrator very lengthy prison sentances.

And I think 'fiddling your expenses' is fraud and shoudl result in MP's not paying them back but being locked up for at least 10 years.

Samsung to 'exit netbooks'

Why would you want a netbook?

It is too big to fit in a pocket so you may as well carry something a decent size, the spec is so low it does nothing really useful so you need to carry something a decent size.

A laptop is good, a smartphone is good, a netbook is something stuck in the middle thats got the worst of both.

Brussels: Water cannot be sold as remedy for dehydration

Not really eurosceptic, but can I just ask....

How much of the EU tax payers money was spent on a 3 year investigation on whether water prevented dehydration?

Amazing really they even bothered.

Personally I will stick with bottled beer rather than bottled water, far more in nutrients :)

Obama says his birthplace is 'in Asia'

Morons everywhere - especially in the electorate

The biggest single flaw in 'democracy' is that the stupid and ill informed are allowed to choose. As they are too stupid and too ill informed the choices they make are quite often also stupid and ill informed. We have it here - a parliament of back stabbing, money grabbing, greedy and usually quite stupid politicians who have no knowledge about anything beyond fiddling expenses and hiding the back handers they get. Yet the stupid idiot electorate time and again puts these discredited individuals in a position of power.

In the case of America this stupidity is almost boundless and is really just a competition to see who has most money from people who think that owning the president will give them an advantage (it usually does). In the UK the media are the ones who choose - remember 'The Sun' and their 'last person out turn off the lights' headline - blatant and discreditable bias, but of course they were not only allowed to publish but never run off the street for it. (other media is just as bad - including the BBC).

How long before the great unwashed mass of idiots finally realise what a ride they are being taken for? Over here our government have just handed the already rich Richard Branson at least another 800,000 poinds of tax payers money in the form of a cheap cut price bank. The only promise made is not to sack any of the few thousand workers for a couple of years (perhaps cut their pay and bonus and let them leave, just don't sack them). The average British idiot thinks this is fine!

Compact Disc death foretold for 2012

Also a fail

My old and expensive hi-fi, my expensive car, neither will be updated this year, next, or probably the next 10 (for the record main car is already 8, eldest is 51, other cars in the middle, most are 'main cars' kept). On average I dont' bother replacing a main car with another main car until it is at least 20. Frankly theres no point.

Quality

I think most of the trash put out by the record labels these days is far better for not being reproduced properly. Frankly haven't heard a record in about 15 years that I'd actually want to hear again - never mind buy.

Not sure I fully agree with that - its analogue. Any digital format is only ever an approximation of the analogue value so is always lossy - even dvds.

Personally I'm always amused by people that think that dvd/cd's et al are somehow immune to dirt and scratches that used to blight vinyl - I don't have more than about 2 cd's that still play in the car - and they have all been kept in their boxes (which are hardly robust either).

Google's legal boss is fed up with patent warfare

Make the patent office that issued the patent resposnsible for BOTH parties legal bills in the event of a patent defeat - that will focus minds when it come to granting patents on things like the shape of a tablet or a feature that already exists on another platform.

When a company wants an injunction for a patent don't grant it, if the patent claim is successful then the infringing company is required to pay extra compensation.

Don't allow patent infringement claims from a company not actively marketting a product containing that patent (killing off the patent trolls instantly).

The Great Smartphone OS Shoot-out

Depressingly difficult to find

But if you do look or ask many phone shops do still have them - well some at least, in the UK mainly N8 and C7 (though there are several others). If you head to Germany there are more than that in some shops.

Nokia are low in the sales rankings because their advertising and marketting departments shoudl have been shot and replaced with people that have a clue what to do - if Nokia had done this 3 years ago they'd still be in the number 1 slot - the products are actually damned good.

Frankly when faced with an onslaught of advertising from Apple putting an occasional advert of a blind man taking photos of a roller coaster was really just a completely stupid and idiotic idea - the person behind that should be lynched by the shareholders for the damage he has done to their investment.

the weather app is a useless example, other things are more useful

For example traffic updates for my route home. Perhaps news flashes or sports scores will be fun for some.

waiting for web pages to load before allowing something is a BAD thing

It really shouldn't be necessary either. I note that internet exploder does the same. Mobile Explorer on the Sony Z5 10 years back would draw the page as it arrived allowing you to select links and other things as soon as it had them. It wasn't difficult. And as for fitting a webpage to screen (smart wrap or whatever you want to call it) MME did that because it did not support left to right panning (the Z5's jog dial really suggested we shouldn't so we never did). This made the browser better. I note that my Blackberry browser opens with a view that I defy ANYONE to be able to read, which means I then need to go and find a zoom capability to see anything - pointless

Agreed, indeed in terms of numbers of shipped phones it is still important

Even though Nokia can't seem to learn the basic skills of keeping your mouth shut before you shoot, marketting the good points of your devices, or doing an apple (telling everyone your phone is the only phone that can do what everyone else was doing 2 years back).

Skype?

"both platforms support Skype, which is a major advantage over Blackberry and Windows "

According to Skypes website skype is available on windows mobile. Of course the fact most mobile operators prevent you from using it even if you do download it makes it much less of an advantage.

Massive PC shortages to hit this Xmas

Blame the accountants

They are the ones who claim that just in time is the way to go... they forget things like this, unexpected demand (as with the Tracey Islands a few years back) and similar mean massive lost opportunities. Wouldn't it be nice to be the only PC manufacturer with enough stocks of drives to fill the shelves in December?

India uncloaks new thorium nuke plants

Decline - bit gentle

Think the term fell off a cliff edge is most appropriate. Of course the rich 0.1% who pay the slightly less rich but certainly very comfy politicians are getting their way. And they don't care when us pathetic little guys have cold hovels, can't travel and can only envy them on the bit of the internet they don't censor to oblivion.

US Navy in new electromagnetic railgun milestone

Spin stabilisation

I would guess from the tone of the video and article - lots of spin :)

Cyberattack Blighty and we'll use 'military means' - UK gov

Military means.... wow, so they're going to put some money into the forces?

I mean, come on...

No aircraft for our remaining aircraft carriers (the most recent refurbished one being chopped up in the middle east)... this means (as we should have learnt when Prince of Wales was sunk by the Japanese - that the whole surface fleet is useless, and because that means no support for the submerged fleet that also is useless.

No ships to ensure the flow of supplies means no oil for the airforce so thats grounded as well (and anyhow theres not enough of it left to do more than a Buck house fly past).

No ships or aircraft mean the army is of no use outside of the UK, even if we could persuade the Belgiums to keep us in guns and spare parts (we don't use our own make of course - this is Britain). Worse I suppose, we buy our army uniforms from China (so if we fall out with them I guess our soldiers invade using camoflage paint all over), our bullets from South Africa (well at least its on the way to China if you take the slow boat....

Oh I love Cam morons empty threats - he's a gem.

Brit boffins print blinking booze bottle labels

James Bonds Aston on its way

Must buy some the idea of the car changing colour .... brilliant .... would confuse the coppers properly :)

Google and co join gov's identity marketplace

Cameras first, this next

Love the way the UK government keeps trying to persuade us that being spied on in everything we do is in our best interests. Pity the gulivle masses are so stupid they fall for it.

Fixing Android mobes costs telcos millions

Tough luck

The operators have pushed the technology without understanding it, the punters have splashed money out without any more knowledge - all compounded by a seriously uninformative media. So operators are going to cough up a lot of money and punters a lot of grief for their decisions - and it looks like the media who have touted this as wonderful will end up wearing a lot of egg (though they will collectively forget they had anything at fault).

One interesting comparison would be how much per handset each platform costs to support - S60, Blackberry, Microsoft, Android and iPhone... that would be much more useful knowledge

Google report reveals YouTube takedown requests... by country

Democracy?

We have neither freedom of speech nor democracy in this country - just look at what happened in the 'mother of parliaments' this week.

Every MP that voted to squash the peoples right to a vote should be ashamed, shot for treason and not reelected.

As for freedom of speech look at the latest attempts to justify clamping down on the internet. Look at the BBC and the way it monitors, edits and blocks postings on its website, the way it closes down debates, reduces the amount you can post and the frequency of posts to make sure you can't say anything of value. They aren't the only ones but they are probably the most obviously under direct government control.

Of course the vast majority of the masses are happy if they can watch Coronation street, moan about Eastenders, or complain about some football star and see some 'celebrities' knickers. Unfortunately the uninformed and frankly stupid masses have been given the vote - not because it improves democracy but precisely the opposite, those with power long ago realised that if they want to avoid problems swamp the few thinkers with millions of stupid idiots and brain wash the stupid peasants into thinking that giving their employers the right to sack them at the drop of a hat, taxing them to pay bankers billions in bonuses or making sure you are lined up for a good job when you leave parliament by 'not getting any financial benefit' from allowing a group of multinationals to determine our defence policy is the best way forward.

Nokia's Brave New World is (almost) Finn-free

judging by profits and share price you're not the only one

Can get the mapping stuff on the existing S60 smartphones, have done, its brilliant.

Laughed at that

Are you really serious? Android and iPhone are no where near good - battery life is poor, processors have to be massive. Symbian is actually the best of the mobile OS's - designed from the ground up for battery life (which is exceptional), stability and lack of virus opportunity.

WinMob isn't actually bad - built on top of wince technically its actually pretty good, the dev environment is superior to all the others which will lead to an explosion of applications as soon as the phone gains in popularity.

As for the BSOD we are all so used to from windows desktop don't expect to see that ... the underlying OS, the applications on top of it, the device drivers and other such stuff were all built by a different team to the desktop guys. The hardware is much more under control (it doesn't have to cater for 20 different manufacturers from a single build), the device drivers and other Nokia specific content in this device will have been 'tested to death' by Nokia and Microsoft. I will eat my hat and yours if you get a BSOD in the first 10 years of having one.

BTW I don't work for either company - I have worked for both over the years and left for other work - but I do know my way around smartphones having worked in the industry since Nokia started it, I go back far enough to have worked on Epoc32 which was the starting point for the Symbian OS.

I'd rather have a winmob phone than an iPhone.... at least

I'll have bought it with my brain not my backside.

Windows mobile is actually both more open and more competant. With Nokia behind it you will see it has better equipment and more form factors.

Android - well, lots of hype but I've tried a couple and was not very impressed.

Probably not a pink phone for me, but certainly one of the other colours.

I'd have rather he had sorted out the S60 stuff, but winmob is excellent.

Where am I going tomorrow? My electric car charger wants to know

minor problem

The main objection to petrol is the CO2 produced... ethanol will produce CO2 as well.

Now, if we were to run methane then it could be collected from the sewers, true burning this also produces CO2, but as CO2 is mess damaging than methane in terms of greenhouse gas then that is better. The methane is a natural biproduct of so many humans. In fact, thinking of the beer problems below my methane production is higher when I've had a load of beer and a kebab, so perhaps the government will see the advantage of lowering beer tax in order to encourage more methane production :)

Rot

a) The range is NOT 80 miles in most electric cars unless you are prepared to drive along at the speed of a bicycle. In most scenarios of reasonable speed the range is down around 30 miles

b) I don't know where this figure for 'most journeys' is - the SHORTEST commute I have ever driven was 15 miles each way. My current commute is 25 miles each way. My longest commute was near 50 miles each way.

If I want to see my son its 260 miles each way.

Electric cars are just the wrong technology. We need something that actually works - all the money and effort on a dead end technology is just not helping us with the basic problem, we need to ditch the petrol engine.

My current daily commute is along a dual carriageway, I do it at 50mph to save fuel at this speed I have some serious problems with the lorries that are (illegally) trying to do rather more than this and get upset with me. I can't imagine taking one of the lightweight electric cars along at the 25-30mph it would need to do in order to complete the journey. The fact I could then charge it for 8 hours at work is a bonus, but by the time I get home of an evening I wouldn't be able to get to rugby training or the gym...

100 miles ... erm, yes but no but

Well yes, it can do 100 miles as long as you only drive at 35mph for a small 1 or 2 mile burst and restrict the other 99 miles to 20mph or less.

Perhaps I exagerate a little but go check what these battery car test cycles are - the old milkfloat was better.

probably the same reason...

that we don't collect the flare pipe gas and use it, or the methane from the sewers / rubbish tips - because those with the money to invest in doing such things would rather buy a new car

er, please...

20p on a phone call to find no taxi available, 20p on another, then half an hour finding a pone book, 20p on a third.... after 45 mins or so finally find a taxi company, wait 30 minutes for them to drag themselves out of bed or wherever, another 20 minutes for them to drive out to yours, finally hear the honk of the horn then you can start your journey....

load of old b****x

There is an interesting other thing that could work with leccy cars - and thats the train - take the channel tunnel train, run it all over the country, replace the lines beeching scrapped, put back the stations, allow people to drive onto the train - maybe even to charge up on the train - and then the journeys we actually need to make are shorter and the mileage problem goes away.

Actually - save us all a lot of hassle and do it anyway, then polution from the old fashioned petrol engines we use now will be so much reduced the whole panic will go away.

not simple

The batteries actually have a very limited lifecycle, so the costs are not going to be trivial

Having a store of batteries at a motorway services capable of replacing the 'flat' ones bought in during a recharge period (about 8 hours) is going to require a collosal investment. Looking at any reasonably busy petrol station you would need around 12 machines each capable of changing a battery pack every 5 minutes for 8 hours - so needing a store of around 1200 of these battery packs.

Then physically not only do the batteries need to be the same but the location of them and means of accessing them need to be similar enough for a machine to cope. Thats not going to be all simple - even if you separate bikes, cars and lorries.

Basically its just not the right technology.

Perhaps these people should get a life

I certainly have a life. I can also inform these people that I can't tell you tomorrow what journeys I will make, whether the weather will cause me to have headlamps, foglamps, wipers and heater on or the windows open.

Electric cars are a con and not the right thing at all. As a way of storing energy it is not the dense enough. It is also environmentally hostile with low lifetimes, vast quantities of heavy metals causing damage to the environment, the mining of the materials etc. also adding to problems.

If they were the solution the charging would need to be very quick - like refueling is today in a petrol car. This suggests maybe some form of capacitor might be a better answer.

Personally steam is the way forward - its a compact store of energy, easliy replenished, can be fireless, provided from petrol stations converted to supply steam in easy measurable and quick ways, created using any green fuel source and the use of it in transport is well understood. You don't need a thundering great steam roller or traction engine, steam lorries and cars existed (and many still do the London-Brighton rally). The materials can be normal steel and aluminium and not a dangerous and damaging new heavy metal. The steam can be stored in a pressure vessel which doesn't need to be a boiler (fireless locos used to operate in flour, gunpowder and munitions factories).

Crap alchemist jailed for poo-into-gold experiment

yup... wrong to jail him

Next you'll be jailing harrased mothers who set the chip pan on fire.

Its nonsense to jail someone even for a very stupid accident.

Nokia still in the red in Q3 sales bloodbath

When I worked for MS

They had posters showing their phone shooting down Nokia - then the only smartphone of any significance. Looks like Microsoft have succeeded with a cunning ploy of putting a puppet at the top of Nokia armed with a large knife.

The real truth is that Nokia could have succeeded, could have beaten off both Android and iPhone. Simply all they had to do was get shot of the lazy incompetent and useless marketing department and put some people that had some get up and go in their place.

I mean - the N8 is a FANTASTIC phone with a brilliant camera, brilliant build, brilliant phone call quality, superb applications, neat user interface and a store of bolt ons if the myriad of built in apps finally bores you (it will take some time). But how did Nokia advertise it? They had a blind guy taking photos of a roller coaster - I mean, come on what the ***** was that all about?

I have seen films made for internal Nokia consumption showing the phone in use through out the day - it was brilliant, I have seen the wonderful feature film actually shot entirely using an N8 (and no, you can't tell it wasn't shot using a huge expensive film camera), the strange film shot of flying bugs - shot by phones attached to the bugs themselves.

Come Nokia shareholders - get shot of Elop, get shot of the current marketting failures, put some new markettign people in place, get your wonderful products in the shops, let people know they are there and get back to number 1 in the smartphone stakes.

And, yes, sue the BBC for its continual advertising of iPhone - it really isn't supposed to advertise and it clearly is - any balanced reporting would cover the frequent Nokia, Samsung, Blackberry launches as well as the iPhone launches, but as they don't then they are clearly biased.

Sack the entire marketting department NOW

Ridiculous. Nokia are producing new model after new model yet if you go into any mobile phone shop in the UK, or most of Europe, you will find at most two, but sometimes even NO Nokia smartphones available. Why? Because no one wants them. Why doesn't anyone want them/ Because no one knows they exist or what they do. The advert for the N8 (still the best camera phone you can buy - bar none) was a blind person taking pictures of a roller coaster - hardly inspiring, and it certainly doesn't give any insight to the wealth of features, applications, capabilites built in to the device, nor does it give insight to what you can add in the way of downloads. Thats before you get to the build quality, phone call capability, robustenss, battery life, screen and other advantages.

Nokia STILL build the best smartphones, just no one knows it because the marketting department is sitting on its fat laurels expecting people to continue to buy Nokias despite the fact they can't be found in most shops out of some old fashioned brand loyalty. Apple are running rings aorund Nokia's marketting - when was the last time the BBC or even The Register report the launch of a Nokia (or Samsung, Blackberry, Sony, LG...) phone?

When he has sacked and replaced the marketting department the 'head honcho' should also fall on his own sword - Elop anouncing to the world that S60 and Symbian was dead 2 or more years before a replacement will be available, when millions are tied up in new products being developed and launched was a blunder far in excess of anything that even the muppets in charge of the banks managed to get wrong. Small wonder he was allowed to leave Microsoft to persue other interests....

App Store groupthink is bad news for small devs

lemmings

The human race is becoming ever more lemming like. Apple says heres a new iPhone and millions go and order something they've never even touched. Everyone buys the same apps, the same books, watches the same films (or worse 'Big Brother')....

The individual is now so rare they are an endangered species. We will end up like the various horror/action/fun films from a few years ago where an individual emerges and stirs heaps of trouble by daring not to think exactly the same as all the plebs.

My Council Services

oh please

"Can't hide behind a wall of anonymity" how stupid - of course they can, an email address can be obtained and I doubt that either it, the info provided (perhaps to hotmail) or even the mobile phone number are actually checked by a real person really phoning up... Thus all the info can be fake - and it is whenever I am filling in unnecessary detail demanded on various webforms.

"is the car taxed" - the DVLA are busy telling us no one can hide from their computers for tax or insurance... so thats a pointless question isn't it.

In fact, as the council will blindly ignore you just as much as they ignore everyone unless you don't pay your council tax makes the whole application a waste of time, effort, space on your phone, money.

Hundreds of websites share usernames sans permission

If we all just gave these muppet sites false information whenever we can then they would stop doing it.

Why, for example, do websites where you need to contact a company to complain/ask info REQUIRE name, address, phone, email, date of birth, inside leg, length of dong....

They need a way of replying (in some cases) and little else.

The BBC is one offender requiring far more than needed. As such they have a person 'anotherfakename' living in TV centre with their switchboard as a phone number and a defunct and dead hotmail email account. They 'need' and 'require' the information but clearly don't.

RIM BlackBerry Torch 9810

Annoying 'feature'

Have you tried to enter a password on one of these? Unlike with most mobiles you never get to view what you actually typed - not even for a couple of seconds. I can assure you - however 'easy' this keyboard might be according to the sales literature it will take on average 5 attempts to enter any even vaguely tricky password.

I've also had it tell me corporate emails are sent only to find they got sent 'en masse' several days later.

Solarcars are hot!

Could be a unicycle in terms of road use with a second toy wheel fitted with a brake somewhere in the corner of the cab to obey the riules (not touching the road)

UK gov needs better data skills to cut spending

Some simple options

I have bid for government contracts and found the following...

(a) It doesn't matter if your whole team have worked on this type of work before if your company hasn't then you can go hang

(b) If your company hasn't been around 3 years then go hang

(c) If your company is British go hang

(d) If your company isn't several thousand strong go hang

(e) If your company doesn't have a bunch of engineers in Bangalore being paid 2d a week but being charged at #1500 a day then you can go hang

These rules go on until the point you get the answer - if you are not one of the 2 big consultancies then you stand no chance at all. Thus if you are one of those you can charge what the hell you like - normally #1500 a person a day. And you can quote the duration you like (real one x3)

If this was fixed then government spending on IT would plummet massively, and they could spend that much reduced budget supporting small British companies full of hard working British workers, these companies could expand and employ more - cutting the unemployment problems.